Under Drinkwitz, Missouri begins to see itself differently - ESPN

EYEWEAR USED TO be a kind of prison until glasses became cool. Around the time jocks who never needed prescriptions began flaunting designer frames as a declaration of style. Which was long after Eli Drinkwitz had been memorialized in pictures from his adolescence, dorked-out in big, round lenses he inherited from his older brother, Jeremy. The head football coach of the Missouri Tigers has been the victim of lousy vision his whole life, and in his early 40s now seems the kind of glasses-wearer who forsakes image in favor of comfort. His current pair being a good example: soft rectangular lenses with practically invisible frames.

Only it turns out that Drink doesn't like his glasses at all. He doesn't like how they make him look on the field. He doesn't like how they make him look in the locker room. He doesn't like that they feed into a perception straight out of the 1950s that people think he's a nerd. Even though he has described himself publicly as «a 5-10 dorky white dude» and, in his first year, when the Tigers upset LSU, said aloud, «Let's be honest, I have no business being a head coach.» Within him seems to be a more ambitious evaluation of himself and what he can achieve, that he can actually take Mizzou somewhere it has never been before in football: to an SEC championship or — also his words — to the College Football Playoff. And maybe his glasses muddle in his appearance the sort of aggression such winning seems to demand.

I LIKE THE guy. When he was introduced nearly five years ago and made his first public appearance with his wife and four daughters at the ceremony in Columbia, Marching Mizzou played the fight song to lead him through a shroud of fake smoke and he walked onto Faurot Field swiveling his